The team at Sun behind OpenSolaris has unleashed OpenSolaris 2009.06 upon the world. This new release comes packed with new features, changes, improvements, and fixes, and is the first release of OpenSolaris for SPARC, adding support for UltraSPARC T1, T2 (Sun4v), and UltraSPARC II, III and IV (Sun4u). Read on for some of the improvements that stand out.

Interestingly: while hardware support is limited compared to Linux, the kernel that supports more devices -- with a big variance in the quality of device drivers -- than any other operating system kernel, OpenSolaris has shown that hardware support can be greatly improved in very short time when you got the talent, right people and some money. For any observer who has been involved in kernel development, the progress with OpenSolaris has been actually quite amazing in this area. All in all, this is a good example that the "superior" hardware support in Linux is not written in the wall and similar results can be achieved with proper engineering practices.

For the performance-related comment: I can not seriously think what you were after here. Our experiences at work have been exactly the opposite.

I think his experience might be similar to mine. OpenSolaris is slower right now for some desktop, personal computing tasks but perhaps more robust for some enterprise level features.

You make a good point about hardware support. Every time I've interacted with OpenSolaris developers, they seem enthusiastic and responsive, unlike some linux communities with which I've interacted. I'm not sure which direction OpenSolaris will go aside from development around Oracle's assets, but I hope it continues as a desktop platform, if for no other reason than to offer variety and competition.

Interestingly: while hardware support is limited compared to Linux, the kernel that supports more devices -- with a big variance in the quality of device drivers -- than any other operating system kernel, OpenSolaris has shown that hardware support can be greatly improved in very short time when you got the talent, right people and some money. For any observer who has been involved in kernel development, the progress with OpenSolaris has been actually quite amazing in this area. All in all, this is a good example that the "superior" hardware support in Linux is not written in the wall and similar results can be achieved with proper engineering practices.

For the performance-related comment: I can not seriously think what you were after here. Our experiences at work have been exactly the opposite.

All my observations were made comparing the current version of Open Solaris to the current version of Ubuntu and the final beta (Since they keep pushing the date up) of Fedora Core 11.

I have all 3 installed on separate hard drives in my Dell 755 and I tested the same things on all three.

1. Boot times
2. Hardware drivers and ability to use the hardware
3. Included software
4. Ability to use the machine for day to day work
5. Machine speed after boot

The conclusions are what I saw from these simple tests.

I mean as you see my screen name is Windows sucks but I am man enough to say that even though I would trust my machines to Fedora or Ubuntu over Windows. Windows 7 runs better then Fedora 11, Ubuntu 9.04 and Open Solaris combined. That is just facts from running the current beta of Windows 7 on the same machine.

"Owned by Sun but does not come with office suite?? Doesn't Sun own an Office Suite?"

OpenOffice descends from Sun's StarOffice.
By using OpenSolaris' package management system you can download OpenOffice (for free, as with all other packages and system/security updates).
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It was mentioend ...

"It doesn't support as much hardware on the desktop as Linux and what it does support is not as good as linux yet."

If it came down to hardware support, we would all be using Microsoft's operating systems. Hardware support for many free operating systems would be much better if many more hardware manufacturers released relevant technical documentation. For me, I am generally happy with the hardware support.
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It was mentioned ...

"For one Open Solaris is SLOWWWWW."

When is OpenSolaris slow ?
Or is it that your computer system is not optimal
for running OpenSolaris. My experience is with AMD64 systems (Athlonx2, Opteron) and these direct-connect architecture type systems cause OpenSolaris to rip into the tasks at hand.

It appears the Dell 755 uses front-side-bus CPU/mobo architecture; Intel recently went the way of AMD, cloning AMD's direct-connect architecture.

Any serious performance comparison should be done using a direct-connect architecture. I have a dual-CPU (single-core per CPU) HP xw9300 box (4GB RAM, NVidia Quadro FX1400) and the system rips on OpenSolaris, as well as all other operating systems I had tried in the past (Windows, Linux, *BSDs). OpenSolaris is my operating system of choice and performance is great. This includes tasks like building detailed C++ software (using SunStudio tools) to serious image editing in Gimp and to OpenOffice document handling.

Due to being my primary development box, the system can be on for many days and OpenSolaris is fine with this. My only gripe is that while suspend-to-ram works, the resume-from-ram does not work (for now ?) for my hardware. Hopefully, this will be addressed in near future as hardware support for OpenSolaris broadens.

You should also remember that Solaris/OpenSolaris is packed with alot of technologies and the operating system has a proven commercial/warranty/real-world track record. While Linux grew from someone's bedroom, Solaris was being designed and implemented by engineers in a commercial environment with the intent of satisfying real-world criteria.

You need to ask yourself ...

"How good would another operating system run if it contained Solaris-type technologies (e.g. DTrace, ZFS, predictive self-healing framework, crossbow virtualised networking, etc.) and a design also focusing on scalability for big iron hardware (as in multi-processor SPARC-based solutions) ?"

You may think specific Solaris technologies may not matter and so compare operating systems using some common simple denominator and that is like when people compare the performance of OpenSolaris (a real UNIX system) with Linux/BSD (UNIX clone) using gcc-compiled software. The fallacy with this is that anybody doing serious development on Solaris/OpenSolaris use the SunStudio (not GNU gcc/g++/etc.) tools. The SunStudio tools are optimized for Solaris. These tools also allow the developer to perform DTrace-related experiments for the executable being developed.
All this and more leading to the developer being made much more proficient during bug/optimisation diagnosis and leading to better quality software development.
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